[UK] Is DAB/+ radio done?

[Loonabae]

Poor signal quality? Hmm... it was expressly designed to overcome problems of multipath etc. that affected FM, so it would work well "on the road."

When i was younger i saw few articles on how DAB on cars and in houses. Got much better FM signal than they did with DAB, when i had mine it didn't take much to ruin the signal. lol

I think it was the BBC that chose MP2 over 3 because they thought it was better at high rates at the time of making the decision, but other than radio 3 those rates were never used, the format was fatally flawed from the start in the UK.

MP2 and its modern version Musepack are much better on more samples than MP3 was. Eig.wav and others electro samples fail at 320kbps but are fine on 192k MP2 or 170k MPC, The issue was them not using mature and well tuned MP2 encoders.

With amount of flaws MP3 has its lucky that the Lame encoder saved it.

 

[Willem]

I think for around the house internet radio is by now far superior with cheap streamers like the Chromecast Audio. However, for in car use DAB+isstill the best, rovided the infrasdstructure is good enough. Here in Holland it works pretty well, and better than FM.

 

[Berwhale]

Unfortunately, for us in the UK...

"As of 2018, 41 countries are running DAB services.[5] The majority of these services are using DAB+, with only Ireland, UK, New Zealand, Romania and Brunei still using a significant number of DAB services."

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting

DAB+ seems to have been a non-event here. I think this is partly due to the success of radio broadcast on Digital Terrestrial TV (FreeView) and Satelite TV (Sky and FreeSat) in the UK.

 

[xr100]

MP2 and its modern version Musepack are much better on more samples than MP3 was. Eig.wav and others electro samples fail at 320kbps but are fine on 192k MP2 or 170k MPC, The issue was them not using mature and well tuned MP2 encoders.

With amount of flaws MP3 has its lucky that the Lame encoder saved it.

Please do elaborate, I assume you are referring to time-domain behaviour?

 

[Loonabae]

Please do elaborate, I assume you are referring to time-domain behaviour?

Yes, Also the fact there sub band based aswell. They aren't fazed by pre echo like the eig.wav does to vorbis/Lame even at higher settings and other problem samples common to transform based codecs. I have no idea why they didn't just push MP2 with a well tuned encoder instead of embarssing themselves with MP3 launch.

I listen to a lot of electronic were MPC handles it fine while i get clicky pre echo even with V0 or 320k Lame. AAC/Vorbis do have there issues but its more like pixelated smearing with certin sounds. I used a mix of my music and the Hydrogen audio sample folder to say this bit.

 

[JJB70]

In all fairness I suspect most broadcast radio listening nowadays is either in cars or background music at work, for which DAB is perfectly adequate. For home "radio" listening I suspect it is now mainly Internet radio. Even TV is rapidly changing, I would guess we watch 2 - 3 hours broadcast TV a week in my house.

 

[Berwhale]

In all fairness I suspect most broadcast radio listening nowadays is either in cars or background music at work, for which DAB is perfectly adequate. For home "radio" listening I suspect it is now mainly Internet radio. Even TV is rapidly changing, I would guess we watch 2 - 3 hours broadcast TV a week in my house.

I would tend to agree, but surprisingly that view isn't supported by listening figures:

https://www.rajar.co.uk/docs/2019_09/RAJAR Q3 2019 - Chart 2 - All Digital Listening - Clean.pdf

This graph is pretty depressing if you are expecting to attract a younger audience to radio...

https://www.rajar.co.uk/docs/2019_0...6 - Mobile Phone Tablet Listening - Clean.pdf